KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Jacqueline Woodson, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, while on tour for her novel Another Brooklyn, recorded September 20, 2016. The interview was posted as a podcast on October 30, 2016.

Jacqueline Woodson is known for her young adult novels, and won the National Book Award for Young Peoples Literature in 2014 for Brown Girl Dreaming. She was in the KPFA studios to discuss Another Brooklyn, her first adult novel in over two decades. Since that time, Jacqueline Woodson has come out with two middle school novels, Harbor Me and Before the Ever After, the adult novel Red at the Bone, and two illustrated children’s books.

Another Brooklyn tells the story of four African American girls growing up in Brooklyn during the 1970s, focusing on August, a transplant from the South with a single father, growing up during a turbulent era and struggling to find herself.

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Martin Amis (1949-2023), in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff in the KPFA studios, January 27, 1998 while on tour for his novel, “Night Train,” published in 1997.

This is the second of five interviews with Martin Amis for KPFA’s Probabilities/Bookwaves program, which were recorded over a period of 23 years. Along with Night Train, he discusses his novel which was published in 1995, The Information.

The three books he discusses at the end of the interview were a short story collection, Heavy Water and Other Stories, which came out later in 1998, a much celebrated memoir and Booker prize winner, Experience,  in published in 2000, and another long novel, Yellow Dog, a satire focusing on British ideas of masculinity and patrimony, published in 2003.

Known for such novels as London Fields, Money, Time’s Arrow, The Information and The Zone of Interest, the Booker Prize winning memoir, Experience, and his essay collection The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis was he son of novelist and essayist Kingsley Amis, He was also close friends with Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow and Philip Larkin, all of whom he wrote about in his final memoir disguised as a novel, Inside Story, in 2020.

This interview was digitized, remastered and edited in August 2023 by Richard Wolinsky, has not been heard since its original broadcast. and has never been heard in its complete form.

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Elmore Leonard (1925-2013) was a leading light in the field of crime and noir fiction. Author of such novels as Get Shorty, Stick, Rum Punch and other thrillers which became films, he also was the vision behind the now classic television show, Justified and its new sequel Justified: City Primeval, based on his novel City Primeval.

In this documentary using material from interviews conducted in 1988 and 1989, host Richard Wolinsky lets Elmore speak, in his own words, about his career and his writing process. Produced by Richard Wolinsky.

Interviews originally conducted by Richard A. Lupoff, Richard Wolinsky and Lawrence Davidson. Podcast originally posted July 23, 2017. Photo: Creative Commons.

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Tony Hillerman, who died in 2008 at the age of 83, was a master of the detective genre and an important writer in detailing life on the Navajo reservation. His several novels featuring Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee have been acclaimed for their accuracy and for their ability to combine Navajo history and thought into strong plot-driven novels.

There are four interviews with Tony Hillerman in the Probabilities and Bookwaves archive. This first interview, conducted by Richard A. Lupoff, the late co-host of Probabilities, was recorded on January 14, 1987 in a hotel in San Francisco while Hillerman was on tour for his novel, Skinwalkers, the seventh in the series, and the first to feature both Leaphorn and Chee. He would continue to write a total of eighteen books in the series, and his daughter, Anne Hillerman, has continued the series with eight more novels, the most recent being The Way of the Bear, which was published in April, 2023.

Tony Hillerman also wrote four novels outside the series, and several books of non-fiction and photography. The Dark Wind was adapted into a theatrical film in 1991. Three other novels were adapted as TV movies for PBS, and Dark Winds, a streaming series currently on AMC, is adapted from Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee novels.

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The works of Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) seem to have fallen into some kind of unwarranted obscurity in recent years. An author of science fiction, horror and fantasy stories, during his lifetime he was considered a master of genre fiction.

It was Fritz Leiber, according to Wikipedia, who coined the term sword and sorcery to refer to fantasy stories set in medieval times involving knights and squires and castles and dragons and all sorts of magic. His own sword and sorcery duo, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser whose stories were collected in several volumes, along with characters such as Conan the Barbarian by his contemporary, Robert E. Howard, are considered among the most notable in the genre.

A stylist at a time when there were few stylists in science fiction and fantasy, his books often had social themes, including Gather Darkness, set in a future religious dystopia, The Wanderer, which explores what happens when a rogue planet comes near earth, and Our Lady of Darkness, which sets up a lovecraftian world inside modern day San Francisco.

Back in the very early days of Probabilities, the three hosts (Lawrence Davidson, Richard A. Lupoff, Richard Wolinsky) associated socially with Fritz Leiber. There were three recordings to emerge from that time. One of them, focusing on Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser, exists only as a reel to reel tape, still to be digitized. Another was recorded in Leiber’s apartment on Geary Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, when Leiber was more expansive than usual. In that recording, only Fritz’s voice is intelligible. The third was an interview with Richard A. Lupoff, recorded in KPFA’s studios during Science Fiction Day on the KPFA fund-raising marathon in September 1977.

This podcast features that third recording, with two inserts from the Geary Street session, duplicating and expanding on some of the material in Dick Lupoff’s interview. Dick’s interview has not been heard since its initial airing in 1978, and the Geary Street inserts have never been heard until now. This podcast was digitized, remastered and edited in August 2023.

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Lisa See, whose latest novel is “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women,” is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky. Recorded via zencastr on July 14, 2023.

Lisa See’s best-selling books include Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, China Dolls, and most recently, The Island of Sea Women. Each novel, thus far, focuses on the role and lives of women of East Asian descent in various countries, including Korea, Japan, China and the United States. Some of the novels focus on a mystery, others take place within the context of historical events.

Her latest novel, “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women” looks at the life of an historical figure, a female doctor of upper class birth living in China in the 15th Century. As Lisa notes in the interview, the circumscribed life of Tan Yuxian bears a startling resemblance to the isolation we all felt during the Covid lockdown.

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Lillian Ross (1918-2017), in conversation in June, 2002 with host Richard Wolinsky. Encore podcast originally posted September 30, 2017.

Lillian Ross, who died on September 20, 2017 at the age of 99, spent seven decades as a staff writer for the New Yorker Magazine, beginning in 1945. Writing for the Talk of the Town section of the magazine, her credo was “Your attention at all times should be on your subject, not on you. Do not call attention to yourself.” In 1950, her profile of Ernest Hemingway, according to the New York Times, elevated her into the top ranks of New Yorker stylists. Using novelistic techniques for writing non-fiction, she is often credited as the primary influence of what came to be called “new journalism” as exemplified in her series of articles about the making of the John Huston film, The Red Badge of Courage, which were collected in the book, Picture, often called the best book ever written about Hollywood. She spent several years as the mistress of long-time New Yorker editor Willliam Shawn, as chronicled in her book Here But Not Here, from 1998.

This interview with Lillian Ross took place on June 4, 2002 on the publication of her book, “Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism.” Of this particular discussion she later wrote, “ It’s the first time I ever listened to any kind of broadcast on my power book, and I was amazed. It’s the first interview I’ve ever experienced that sounded interesting to me and sounded true to me. That of course is because of you, your questions, your general interest, your understanding, and your response, and then, your editing. I do thank you. I’m very grateful. With great admiration, Lillian Ross.”

Lillian Ross’s final piece, a profile of J.D. Salinger after his death, was published in 2012.

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Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator at Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, discusses a retrospective of the films of the great Spanish director Luis Bunuel playing through November 19, 2023, with host Richard Wolinsky.

Luis Bunuel began his career working with Salvador Dali on the film “Un Chien Andalou,” a masterpiece of the Surrealist movement. After working on another film with Dali, “L’Age d’Or,” and creating a documentary known today as “Las Hurdes” (Land Without Bread), he spent nearly two decades in the Mexican film industry before coming to Hollywood first, and then working with European producers to create masterwork after masterwork, from Viridiana to Belle du Jour to Tristana, The Exterminating Angel, TheDiscreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie through to The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire. The retrospective contains all the later films plus several rarely seen films from his Mexican period.

Recorded at BAMPFA July 7, 2023. Special thanks to AJ Fox.

Pacific Film Archive film series listing.

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Stuart Klawans, author of “Crooked but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges,” in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.

Stuart Klawans was film critic for the Nation  from 1988 to 2021, and before that wrote a small press and poetry column for the magazine. His previous books were Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order, and a collection of his reviews and essays from 1988 to 2001, Left in the Dark.

Preston Sturges was the first in the Hollywood sound era to write and direct his own films, creating a series of movies, from The Great McGinty in 1940, through The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and other classics to Unfaithfully Yours in 1948, that still resonate today.

A retrospective of the films of Preston Sturges runs at Pacific Film Archive July 27th through August 26th, and Stuart Klawans will be on hand to introduce The Great McGinty on July 27th, The Lady Eve on July 29th and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek on July 30th. You can find out more at bampfa.org.

All the films mentioned in the interview are available streaming either for rental via Amazon or Apple, or in the case of Unfaithfully Yours, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock and The Great Moment, free on YouTube.

Photos courtesy BAM/PFA. Radio Wolinsky page photo from The Lady Eve. Special thanks to AJ Fox and Kate MacKay. Recorded via Zencastr July 6, 2023.

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Yiyun Li is an award winning author of novels and short stories. Born in China in 1972, she earned a BA at Peking University before coming to the united States and getting a degree in Immunology from the University of Iowa, eventually moving on to a Master of fine Arts in creative fiction and non-fiction from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker and Paris Review, and two of the stories from her collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers were adapted into films by Wayne Wang. She has also written five novels, the most recent The Book of Goose in 2022.

This is the first of two interviews with Liyun Li. The second was recorded in 2014 for her novel, “Kinder than Solitude.”

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